The humble dough scraper doesn’t seem like much: it’s just a sheet of metal or plastic with a straight, slightly sharp edge, curved on one end to make it easier to hold. In actual fact, it’s one of the most versatile utensils out there, especially if you make bread or pastries on a regular basis.

One use for a dough scraper, as you might have surmised, is to remove the caked-on layer of dough from a flat working surface, which would otherwise be a real pain to clean. It’s also a convenient tool for cutting a large piece of dough into manageable portions, but you’ll soon find a hundred and one other uses for it:

• Cut butter into flour for shortcrust pastry without risking damage to the bowl or a real knife,
• Use the ruler on the stainless steel scraper to make sure all your canapés are the same size,
• Make a perfectly formed hamburger patty on a glass or granite surface before scooping it off,
• Bruise herbs quickly without cutting them,
• Smooth down cake icing more evenly than you could with a spatula,
• Et cetera – you’re certain to discover something this handy tool can do better than whatever you already have.

We prefer this set of scrapers due to both its quality and the fact that it includes a steel scraper with ruler as well as a plastic one for more delicate surfaces, and a curved one meant to get the last scrap of batter out of a mixing bowl. The three pieces fit into one another to take up less space in a drawer.

Baking, whether for desserts or to have fresh bread in your house daily, is a skill anyone can learn. What puts most people off it is probably the mess it tends to make and the difficulty of manipulating the dough. But once you have a scraper, you’ll find that a lot of things become much, much easier.